Your proposed synthesis of Mises and Yudkowsky(?) is moderately interesting, although your claims for the power and importance of such a synthesis suggest naivete. You say that “what’s going so wrong in society” can be understood given two ingredients, one of which can be obtained by distilling the essence of the Austrian school, the other of which can be found here on LW but you don’t say what it is. As usual, the idea that the meaning of life or the solution to the world-problem or even just the explanation of the contemporary world can be found in a simple juxtaposition of ideas will sound naive and unbelievable to anyone with some breadth of life experience (or just a little historical awareness). I give friendly AI an exemption from such a judgement because by definition it’s about superhuman AI and the decoding of the human utility function, apocalyptic developments that would be, not just a line drawn in history, but an evolutionary transition; and an evolutionary transition is a change big enough to genuinely transform or replace the “human condition”. But just running together a few cool ideas is not a big enough development to do that. The human condition would continue to contain phenomena which are unbearable and yet inevitable, and that in turn guarantees that whatever intellectual and cultural permutations occur, there will always be enough dissatisfaction to cause social dysfunction. Nonetheless, I do urge you to go into more detail regarding what you’re talking about and what the two magic insights are.
Oh sorry. I didn’t mean that “what’s going so wrong in society” is a single piece that can be understood given those two ingredients but is otherwise destined to remain confusing. I meant that what one finds on Less Wrong explains part of what’s going so wrong, and Austrian economics (if properly distilled) elucidates the other.
I should clarify though that Less Wrong certainly provides the bigger picture understanding of the situation, with the whole outdated hardware analysis etc., and thus it would be less like two symmetrical pieces being fit together, and more like a certain distilled form of Austrian economics being slotted into a missing section in the Less Wrong worldview.
I also didn’t mean to suggest that adding some insight from Less Wrong to some insight from the Austrian school would suddenly reveal the solution to civilization’s problems. Rather, what I’m suggesting would just be another step in the process to understanding the issues we face—perhaps even a very large step—and thus would simply put us in a better position to figure out what to do to make it significantly more likely that the future will go well.
Not two magic insights, but two very large collections of knowledge and information that would be very useful to synthesize and add together. Less Wrong has a lot of insights about outdated hardware, cognitive biases, how our minds work and where they’re likely to go systematically wrong, certain existential risks, AI, etc., and Austrian economics elucidates something much more controversial: the joke that is the current economic, political, and perhaps even social organization of every single nation on Earth.
As people from Less Wrong, what else should we expect but complete disaster? The current societal structure is the result of tribal political instincts gone awry in this new, evolutionarily discordant situation of having massive tribes of millions of people. Our hardware and factory presets were optimized for hunter-gatherer situations of at most a couple hundred people (?), but now the groups exceed millions. It would be an absolute miracle if societal organization at this point in history were not completely insane. Austrian economics details the insanity at length.
I have also found claims that one or a few simple ideas can solve huge swaths of the world’s problems to be a sign of naivity, but another exception is when there is mass delusion or confusion due to systematic errors. Provided such pervasive and damaging errors do exist, merely clearing up those errors would be a major service to humanity. In this sense, Less Wrong and Misesian epistemology share a goal: to eliminate flawed reasoning. I am not sure why Mises chose to put forth this LW-style message as a positive theory (praxeology), but the content seems to me entirely negative in that it formalizes and systematizes many of the corrections economists (even mainstream ones) must have been tired of making. Perhaps he found that people were more receptive to hearing a “competing theory” than to having their own theories covered in red ink.
Your proposed synthesis of Mises and Yudkowsky(?) is moderately interesting, although your claims for the power and importance of such a synthesis suggest naivete. You say that “what’s going so wrong in society” can be understood given two ingredients, one of which can be obtained by distilling the essence of the Austrian school, the other of which can be found here on LW but you don’t say what it is. As usual, the idea that the meaning of life or the solution to the world-problem or even just the explanation of the contemporary world can be found in a simple juxtaposition of ideas will sound naive and unbelievable to anyone with some breadth of life experience (or just a little historical awareness). I give friendly AI an exemption from such a judgement because by definition it’s about superhuman AI and the decoding of the human utility function, apocalyptic developments that would be, not just a line drawn in history, but an evolutionary transition; and an evolutionary transition is a change big enough to genuinely transform or replace the “human condition”. But just running together a few cool ideas is not a big enough development to do that. The human condition would continue to contain phenomena which are unbearable and yet inevitable, and that in turn guarantees that whatever intellectual and cultural permutations occur, there will always be enough dissatisfaction to cause social dysfunction. Nonetheless, I do urge you to go into more detail regarding what you’re talking about and what the two magic insights are.
Oh sorry. I didn’t mean that “what’s going so wrong in society” is a single piece that can be understood given those two ingredients but is otherwise destined to remain confusing. I meant that what one finds on Less Wrong explains part of what’s going so wrong, and Austrian economics (if properly distilled) elucidates the other.
I should clarify though that Less Wrong certainly provides the bigger picture understanding of the situation, with the whole outdated hardware analysis etc., and thus it would be less like two symmetrical pieces being fit together, and more like a certain distilled form of Austrian economics being slotted into a missing section in the Less Wrong worldview.
I also didn’t mean to suggest that adding some insight from Less Wrong to some insight from the Austrian school would suddenly reveal the solution to civilization’s problems. Rather, what I’m suggesting would just be another step in the process to understanding the issues we face—perhaps even a very large step—and thus would simply put us in a better position to figure out what to do to make it significantly more likely that the future will go well.
Not two magic insights, but two very large collections of knowledge and information that would be very useful to synthesize and add together. Less Wrong has a lot of insights about outdated hardware, cognitive biases, how our minds work and where they’re likely to go systematically wrong, certain existential risks, AI, etc., and Austrian economics elucidates something much more controversial: the joke that is the current economic, political, and perhaps even social organization of every single nation on Earth.
As people from Less Wrong, what else should we expect but complete disaster? The current societal structure is the result of tribal political instincts gone awry in this new, evolutionarily discordant situation of having massive tribes of millions of people. Our hardware and factory presets were optimized for hunter-gatherer situations of at most a couple hundred people (?), but now the groups exceed millions. It would be an absolute miracle if societal organization at this point in history were not completely insane. Austrian economics details the insanity at length.
I have also found claims that one or a few simple ideas can solve huge swaths of the world’s problems to be a sign of naivity, but another exception is when there is mass delusion or confusion due to systematic errors. Provided such pervasive and damaging errors do exist, merely clearing up those errors would be a major service to humanity. In this sense, Less Wrong and Misesian epistemology share a goal: to eliminate flawed reasoning. I am not sure why Mises chose to put forth this LW-style message as a positive theory (praxeology), but the content seems to me entirely negative in that it formalizes and systematizes many of the corrections economists (even mainstream ones) must have been tired of making. Perhaps he found that people were more receptive to hearing a “competing theory” than to having their own theories covered in red ink.